


Hunters

by pettiot



Category: Final Fantasy XII
Genre: Banter, Flashbacks, M/M, Repression, a strange kind of hurt/comfort, all sorts of repressed trauma, chance encounters, post trauma, self-spite, so much, vossler is trying, vossler!lives
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2020-03-25
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:29:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23156350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pettiot/pseuds/pettiot
Summary: Scraping up a living, Vossler unexpectedly encounters Balthier at loose ends in a backwater town.
Relationships: Balthier/Vossler
Comments: 11
Kudos: 2





	1. Chapter 1

Vossler had no grounds for complaint, but his hurt notwithstanding, he would have fought for his freedom -- had it been anyone but Balthier waiting for him in the tavern's taproom. 

By another's standards, Vossler had lived his life well enough: as a filler of cradles and emptier of them, by cold steel, his life carved into the history of a nation's rise and fall. Only to be struck out from the books of history by the hand of a vengeful queen. 

So, this was to be his fate, the sung retort of a gallant's gun. The same gallant who had once spared him. The turnabout was no cause for despair: Vossler too had once mocked Balthier, despised him, learned begrudgingly that the skypirate and his partner bit the spaces of their own lives out of a history that held no room for them; the poison of his resentment leached from unhealing wounds, Vossler had learned to admire their way of life, if warily.

Vossler felt the peculiar bitterness of having just paid for a room he would not be likely to use.

Courage, therefore. He thundered through the doors.

Expecting Balthier to end it quickly, Vossler was disappointed. Hunched in the borderline dark, the skypirate stayed focused on one of his many plates. 

At a loss, still expecting his imminent demise, Vossler arranged his sword and pack on a spare table. Slightly too large for the proportions of the room, Vossler folded himself into the booth opposite Balthier.

Glassy-eyed, the skypirate wiped his dripping nose, startled to realize he had company. For once, he was not even remotely presentable for it. Sweat soaked through a threadbare white shirt displaying a decided lack of lace. Shimmering beads clung to his brow, prevented from cascade by the combined furrow of a brow and the fine, fey angles of his eyebrows. 

Balthier promptly resumed tunnelling through his current plate of red-bean chilli with a renewed fervour.

The only bottle on the table looked to hold the speciality of the house, a beyond-hot sauce brewed to combat the endless fog. Bemused, Vossler held the flask to the light. From the level remaining, it had been applied with an indiscriminate hand.

'It's not real.' 

Balthier's voice was over-loud, husky with heat. He nodded at the bottle.

With poise, Vossler returned it to the table with a thump and kept his eloquent response to himself.

'Decanted imagination, that is. I could drink it straight, and there wouldn't be any real damage done to mouth, to teeth, to tongue. It's a matter of nerves, a chemickal reaction of substance and saliva creating said caustic sensation.' 

Balthier set down his fork to tend brimming eyes, and, by frantic motion, the rest of his face. Lips that had been greasy were left looking dry and vulnerable amidst the heavy stubble. 

Grappling for a response suitably portentous, Vossler said, 'If a tree falls, the philosophers claim...'

'Mm?'

'Regardless the cause, if you feel it, it’s real?'

Balthier waggled the fork in disappointment. 'An arguable point. If I were an argumentative type.'

'You think you aren’t?' 

'Affable, agreeable me? How can there be any question, oh honourable knight?' A stretched smile delivered itself with surprising tenderness. 

Though that tenderness, Vossler thought, could have been his own misinterpretation of teary eyes. 

'In my experience, Balthier, you're either right or gone.'

Or glaring, seemingly.

Yet the anger faded almost immediately. 'Our bodies are traitors. How can we trust anything they feel? To think we're tricked so wholly into believing this _burns_.' Balthier waved his fork through the sauce bottle, which affirmed its reality by rejecting his measure with a dull ring. 'Mind over matter, huh. Do we mind it only if it matters? More like it matters only if we mind it.'

With another spadeful of chilli, an action somewhere between mastication and wince, Balthier waggled his brows meaningfully. 

Considering the empty plates, enough food had passed here to have fed three. From this clear evidence of Balthier's company, a tense Vossler expected Fran to step from the shadows and bind him, by spell or sword, into immobility. No longer expecting his death, Vossler suspected someone must have paid more for a hunter to bring him in alive. And thinking he knew who, Vossler cringed inwards. Not a snail retreating into its shell; he was a cockatrice, head tucked deep within his shoulders, ready to ram.

'I didn't think Fran suffered this kind of spice.'

The fork shrieked across porcelain. 'Well noted, honourable sir. She does not.'

The decadent spread acquired a secondary meaning. 'Let you off the leash for a night, has she?'

Watery eyes turned baleful. 'Charming. From a man who still wears a collar.'

'Where is she?'

'Elsewhere.'

'Securing routes of egress, no doubt?'

'Oh,' Balthier said, vengefully, 'I should certainly think so, if I had any idea what you meant.'

'I am,' Vossler surrendered, 'too tired for this wordplay.'

In a manner as old as lawlessness itself, he set his elbows amongst the table's clutter, presenting his wrists together. 

Yet Balthier sniggered at his submission, which embarrassed Vossler enough to snatch his hands away. His sleeve came back soggy with orange grease. He masked his confusion in examination of his unexpected spoils. 

The skypirate would hardly be using a Judge's cuffs in a town that distrusted the Archadian military presence. Vossler could expect grovelling unconsciousness, or perhaps a slave's shocking collar, an ignoble march down fogged and cobbled streets to the Strahl's familiar shadows. 

'Just one thing, Balthier. In the interests of old comradeship, however fleeting ours was.'

'Nary in the interests of our old antipathy, perchance? That was somewhat less fleeting, if rather one-sided.'

'Tell me who I should be readying myself to expect at the end of this. Dalmasca's crown? Or the Archadian magistracy?'

A puzzled frown bloomed. 

'A free bidder, then?' But that made no sense. Who else was there that could possibly want him? Following Shiva's fall, Vossler's months in the company of the Rozzarian torturers had shaken loose every piece of information he had.

Balthier's confusion became outrage. 'You think I'm here to collect on your bounty!'

'Why else?'

Biting his words, Balthier said, 'Cadeshead is famous, to those in the know, for the best range of chilli dishes this side of Landis' vast wasteland. A different pot simmering away every night of the week. Care for a sample that's not on your sleeve? No? Not to your tastes, hmm? Well, why the hell are _you_ here, _hunter_? I might as well ask, seeing as there's almost an equal bounty on my _own_ head!'

'There was a hunt advertised – not _you_ , gods, settle yourself. Another one, in the mists, I heard rumour in the last place I worked…' Because Vossler was on edge, startled to have evoked Balthier's rare, yet explosive, ire, he muttered defensively, 'And I like this place, this little town.'

With a more customary quickness, Balthier said, 'Well, it can't be the weather appealing to our desert son; I would've sworn Dalmascans went to rust in fog. Go to ground here, do you?'

Vossler lamented his lack of a firm denial.

Balthier almost grinned. 'Clever move, that, making your bed in an Archadian town. Considering ninety percent of your bounty is Archadian funded.'

'Quietly, skypirate. The locals might take offense at your disrespect.'

'Eh?'

'Calling this place Archadian. A curse, that.'

Then Vossler grinned, and they grinned at each other, relieved to have returned to common ground.

'Calling it, or being it?' Smile fading, Balthier shrugged. 'Unpatriotic little apostrophe of an archipelago, this place. Archades never should have bothered to conquer it, it's given our Imperial elitists nothing but fog, smugglers and trouble.' He turned to the anteroom door. 'Hear that, you? Not worth the bother!'

'The chilli's quite good,' Vossler murmured. 'Apparently.'

The bloodshot eyes took on a canny glint. 'This your inn of choice, when burrowing down? It's a smuggler's inn, you know.'

'I know. Seapirates. The Mist here is thick enough it can’t be told from fog half the time.'

Obligatorily contemptuous, the skypirate's pretty lip curled in salute of his zero-altitude brethren.

' _Very_ clever choice for a hidey-hole. I wouldn't have thunk it of you, old man. No one likely to talk to your biggest bounty bidders at all.'

In receipt of an unexpected admiration for his entirely accidental knowledge of the Ivalician underworld, Vossler shrugged.

'If I ever hear of anyone who does pick you up as a mark, I'll know where to send word. For old times' sake, eh? Is a two day head start enough?'

'Basch truly didn't send you, Balthier? Not even on reconnaissance?'

'Goodness,' Balthier said, 'You've even said his name, is this healing I see on the horizon? Assuage your concerns, fellow runaway, I’m decidedly not feasting from his Excellency Gabranth's bountiful palm.'

'You weren't seeking me out?' 

Balthier shook his head.

Vossler prodded at the uncertain emotion that rose in place of his unease, and realized that, failing Basch or Ashelia as a motivation, he wanted Balthier to want him again.

 _Sordid old man_ , he reprimanded himself. 

Suddenly, his earlier comment regarding the slippage of leashes shamed him further.

'Then why are you here?'

'The food, Vossler, which, believe it or not, is getting _cold_.

'Light, Balthier! Tell me the truth, I feel like I'm waiting for the knife in my back, or the – the –‘ _Kiss?_ Vossler queried himself. ‘Where the hell is Fran?'

Their brief camaraderie died.

‘I don’t know.’

'The _truth_.'

Shouting, 'I don't know! She left me!'

The skypirate may as well as been speaking dialect. 

‘What do you mean, she left you?’

‘I mean, at the last aerodrome, she obtained clearance codes for the Strahl behind my back, must have bribed the Moogles to fly without me, and took off while I was all unknowing.’ A prolonged sniff. ‘She left me. Shall I say it again? A military thing that, isn't it, all reports in triplicate? Here you are; she left me.’ 

The fork clattered, discarded, Balthier gripping the edge of the table, which was the requisite solid teak required for a brawling dockland bar. Vossler did not doubt that Balthier's wiry muscle could overturn it.

So Vossler braced, expectant. Wanting the explosion, almost, because then he could take control of this unusual, atypical shambles that Balthier had made of his supper, clean Balthier up, put him into bed, where the insensibility of his declaration of _abandonment_ could fade into sleep. 

It would be easy to make things right, if things were as simple as a flipped-up table. Vossler indulged, for a wistful moment, the thought that he could ever make something right.

Tension gone without the upturning of anything more than Vossler’s wellbeing, Balthier tugged a second clean handkerchief from his sleeve, flourished it, and blew his nose loudly.

'Sorry. Stupid sneeze didn't want to come out.'

‘I don’t believe it.'

'You do seem to be having problems with credibility as a concept tonight.'

With an aimless gesture over the evening's detritus, Vossler made his frustration known.

Balthier exhaled. Inadvertently, his nose leaked. He pursued againt with a curse and the soggy handkerchief, saying nasally: 

'An explanation, he wants?'

'He does.'

'She and I,' Balthier said, evenly, 'seemingly got caught in that place between not knowing enough, and having gone through a little too much. Things had to change, you know?'

Where the future was as distant as the past, while the present held a man fast and good. Vossler's nape prickled. Oh, he knew what Balthier meant, for certain, knew it curling into Lowtown’s filthy corners, watching two years of grime and scab being sluiced from a whipped and bony back. 

Pinned between that hard past and the rocky future, Vossler had pressed back the bleakness with all his strength, and been rewarded with – what? His name on Basch’s lips? Certainly never Basch’s trust, or he wouldn’t be here now, a fugitive both from Ashelia’s justice and Archades’ newest helmed and horned hound.

‘So we were there, caught, together; no future, no past, but together still. I didn't have to spite it, right? That there was someone there, right beside me. That Fran would be there, right beside me, no matter how crushing it got. That we would die together, grinning in the face of it all, like we did when Bahamut fell. Win or lose, it would happen to us together. Except it wasn’t _equal_ , was it? _She expected me to leave_. And so acted first. I assume.'

More than one battle, Vossler held his spine straight solely because Basch had his back. Here we are, Basch had whispered. Here we will end our days. Caught, as Vossler was, between his ignorance and his fear, he had wished for no greater truth than that, to die in the company of a friend. Who was suddenly no longer there.

He regarded Balthier's disarray, the degustation that could scarcely drown a dying man's despair, and wondered what it was that brought Balthier and Fran to betrayal.

'What happened?'

'Conflux of circumstances,' Balthier grimaced at his meal. 'After the last disaster, Archades tried to commandeer the Strahl for military service. Idiots. We got away, but barely with our skins. Some unhappy bargains were made, more than a few mistakes – gods, we were coasting on reputation. A few lost cargoes, jettisoned lest we get caught, our belts doubly tightened; the strain was monetary, wasn't it? I felt – guilty. Everything that could have been an asset was in my name, you see, ship, shuttle, bike, armoury, bastardy: even the infamy listed in every Clan hall comes under my name. We sold shuttle, bike, armoury; could do nothing about the bastardy, rode the infamy as hard as we could, and what was left? Not much more but hardship. So rather than run away again, I gave it away.'

Right from the beginning, when Vossler had looked at Balthier through eyes that saw only greedy hunter and callous tomb raider, the skypirate had never struck Vossler as stupid.

'To _her_ ,' Balthier said, and rolled his eyes at Vossler's sudden understanding. 'Only half of it, mind. And why not? Partners in truth and title, not just by reputation. Half of my ship, my profit, my soul, I drafted up the documents, signed them, got the Moogles to file them; a full fifty percent ownership in _everything_ , old man: I gave it to her. And then she left me. What a b--'

‘There's such danger in saying it if you don't mean it.' _Traitor. Betrayer._

Licked lips formed the plosive twice before ejection. 'Why shouldn't I say it? She betrayed me, Vossler. Left me. Just like that. I gave her everything I could, and she went behind my back and abandoned me in a town where I was wanted. Hunted. And then I had to run. Why did she do it to me?'

Bloodshot eyes welled, caught by lids, lashes, and a desperately strained expression, only to water dry cheeks notwithstanding the dam. 

Vossler developed a fascination with the saucy plate directly before him. 

Suddenly, inexplicably, he discovered himself equipped to offer an out. 

‘If you rubbed chilli in your eyes they’ll be leaking like that for a week, you should go wash them out.‘

Balthier humphed an acknowledgement, and was swiftly upstanding. ‘I’ve had it up to my eyeballs regardless. I’m going to get myself a bed.’ A pause, and a long, cringingly wet sniff. The tears welled again. 'It's circumstantial, captain, in truth. I'd swear on my old man's unmourned grave, I didn't expect to see you here. No one will hear about your bolthole from my mouth, you can trust me on that one.'

Still seated, Vossler found himself staring at Balthier's waistline. Some time during his despair, the skypirate had unbuckled his belt and the trousers beneath. Two folds of leather and two halves of shirt gaped wide, between which glistened a perfect pale diamond of distended belly.

'You're a contrary bastard. Most men drown their despair in drink, but you smother it?'

Seeing Vossler's line of sight, Balthier replied sourly, 'Wrong indulgence, the alcoholic kind. Fran likes drinking, you see. Didn't think her mysticism was a Viera thing, did you? She's a sot.'

(So Balthier had wandered across the countryside, aimlessly, using his typical contrary whim as his sole motivation. Which dictated that he return to that which he had once fled (Archades), to hunt within these recently Archadian borders somewhere that held an unbiased node of resentment for his person (Archadian) and profession (skyborne as he was, not shipbound as these villagers valued): wallowing in his self-spiting decisions, piggishly, greedily. Why should he not indulge in further self-spite? Body aching, groaning from it.)

As though fearful of combustion, Balthier picked his way carefully through the tables.

Uncertain of his cue, Vossler said, 'I have a room. I heard you don't.' 

'I have a hope,' came Balthier's equally unsteady response, 'that wasn't an invitation. Because I am profoundly longing for accommodation with a very, very private bathroom right now. It is too much to hope this provincial piece of the picturesque has indoor plumbing?'

'Not likely,' Vossler said, quickly enough, 'I meant, it wasn't. An invitation. I’ll breakfast with you, if you’re still here.’

Balthier's profile was a greener shade of pale. ‘Where do you think I’m going to go, Vossler, without a ship?’

‘Breakfast at seven, then? I might have a proposition for you.'

'A proposition.' Balthier grimaced. 'At seven. Damned military men and their dawn of loving cracks, what-ho. I shall look forward to it, order me a special, I'll see you at ten.'

His stomach curdled disagreeably, loud enough for Vossler to hear.

With a swing of a door, Vossler sat abandoned, if still alive, and somewhat surprised to find himself marginally less alone than yesterday.


	2. Chapter 2

It was gritty, and Vossler woke up on it. 

Cold in a way that felt damp, he also had a mouthful of dust. And he was thirsty. The phantom dampness taunted within the grit, but it tasted of nothing at all. 

He remembered these things called beds. And a sky without mercy, an orchard of orange trees threading scent and memory through the air, ornate cornices and white, so-cool walls against which he could rest his cheek, chest flecked with hairs, hard palms -- but that was with a lover, too long ago. He wrestled his memory for truth, for currency, and pinned down the recollection of a rough wood braced ceiling, a horizon veiled with mist, but not Mist, sheets that were clean enough and a thin pillow, a jerk begun out of habit but hard-on lost to wistfulness, but he could not remember _the other_ \-- and that was right. As of yesterday, in fact. 

Yesterday? Yesterday, he had been here, face down in grit.

Why was he here again, living in thirst and jeopardy? The Rozzarian questioner had kept him in a tiled room with a shiny floor, where he had been given such pain, only the careful, deliberate infliction of such making it tolerable. Vossler knew this: he was important enough to keep alive for as long as they cared to hurt him. Was he grateful? He hated them. This grit and thirst, in comparison, was simply cruel. This was the neglect of masters who simply did not care. 

He had not spoken his own name in months. He was so much clammy dust. Even his blood was dry, black and scabbed around wrists, throat, knees. He checked all four limbs to see if he had sprung a more promising leak.

When that failed him, Vossler crawled the worn path to the well. 

The other occupants of Nalbina's dungeon, in various stages of passively dying, did not get in his way. That told him already the well was empty, but he persisted, doggedly. His memory, however uncertain of its place in time it was, suggested that the water cascaded from a split in the stone sky every few days. From his current state of thirst, he had missed the fall again. He thought, if he reached the lip of the well alive, now, he could simply wait there until it came again.

They wouldn't drag him away from it, not this time. He clenched his hands in the dust and ground his teeth to shards.

'Snakes in the nest,' someone called out, from across the cavern. 'Did you see the size of that one, captain? It was right by your hand. Time to run!'

'Shut up.' A crack of stone on stone, a missile flung for the sake of peace.

'Your breath's more lethal than your aim, sodding fool.' That last sounded less full of raving insanity than it should have. The voice was familiar.

The back of Vossler's skull hurt: he craned his neck, a blind tortoise. He put hands on knees and pushed up instead. Once upon a time, surely not as recently as yesterday, he walked upright, an anvil beneath the sun. No, not yesterday. Yesterday he had been rusting iron groaning through a foreign mist, washed up on the shore of a pebbled beach, where a wood-lined tavern waited for him with warmth and an unexpected presence. Yesterday, he had been alive.

Yesterday?

Memory fragmented. He beheld Nalbina's subterranean dungeon with eyes that swore he was there. Instead of his life, he remembered every shadow and score on these cavern walls. A pre-teen Vossler had learned his country as the General's cartographer: with an uncertain horror, he was suddenly sure he could have replicated his latest prison's walls in perfect contoured detail.

Anywhere but here. He closed his eyes, desperately trying to wake. It must be a dream, a flashback. Not the Rozzarian's cell, either, please the Light and Gran Kiltia, he didn’t want to wake there either. The walls there had been tiled, tiled, tiled, tiled, tiled. He had named each one in the oldest of tongues.

Instead of a cave, his memory latched onto the image of a cage. But even that was wrong, bringing a new horror to his throat: he stood _outside_ of the cage, looking in. A plaque at the base read: _The Consul’s Golden Songbird_.

_Who would sing for that Archadian monster?_

Vossler had. It was why he was here.

And then Vossler curled inside a grave, knees to his hollow chest, looking up at the most beautiful man with dull blonde hair to his shoulders, who was examining the dull stone pillar that marked a fallen soldier. Vossler’s tombstone, the marker one used for those with bodies lost. The engraving spiralled around the pillar, and read: _Vayne Solidor Honours his Greatest Ally_. 

Vossler fled from those memories, real or otherwise, back to Nalbina's dungeon, which was the right place for his current despair. Caged Basch and buried Vossler, that's what the Empire had done. Vossler could only damn himself.

'Don't go closing your eyes again, Captain, or you won't wake up. The snakes are everywhere down here.'

'I say shut up!' The volley of stones and dust clouded dry air, along with a chorus of apathetic agreement.

'You still fucking missed.' In an accent too round to be cant, 'This is hopeless.'

Vossler's eyes burned, seeking focus. He crawled. How far he crawled. That bloody _accent_. The rage lifting him. That Archadian, Tsenoble, accent, rounded as a newsreader’s—

A grimy personage crouched atop two dry-rotted crates propped together to make one. The crates were shoved in front of one of the prison's many uncertain crevices, opened up in some recent earthly disturbance. Suicide slits, they were called. With what miscellanea they could find, the healthier prisoners tried to block off the gaps, but mimics still sometimes got through. They were harder to kill than the walking corpses, much easier to let them feed. Slippage from being drained by a beast into death was a placid way to go, so it seemed. Vossler had watched it happen, time and again, wondering why some others had all the luck. The mimics so far had ignored him.

Nevertheless, only the dying or the madmen wandered near the cracks. They certainly didn't take up house right next to one.

Vossler squinted.

Atop the crates, rags had been gathered nest-like, and therein sat the madman, thin face atop a bulky, tattered shell. The madman rocked towards the crate's edge. 

'Ah, now I see you looking at me, captain. That's good. The snakes here are longer than my arm, so do I swear, and you stay right there, sleeping on the ground, they'll end you. For sure. So come on. Get up here.' Wheedling. Pleading. 'Come on. I've got your bloody back. Crawl a little further. A little more. Now get up here with me.'

Vossler stared at the extended hand. He cared less about snakes, death-dealing or not. 'Water.' It was an imagined sound. He wouldn't make this nightmare real by begging for it, would he? So thirsty. How many times would he die of thirst before the sadistic guards stopped reviving him?

The hand was read. If he begged for Basch, perhaps he would be real, too?

'Come on now, captain.' Rags and dirt-smeared palm and too-clean arm led up to hazel eyes, glittering, and a steady gaze. Balthier lowered his voice, a monologue, a muttering mad enough sound, 'Up here. Don't let them see me. Come on. I'll get you out. These snakes, you see, will be eating Dalmascan tonight if they find you, because the fresh word so recently released into this place says you once kept company with the grandest Solidor snake of all.'

This could not be right. Balthier in filthy rags, holding out a hand. Balthier was a mocker, a mockery of a man; in their wanderings across the Sandsea, Vossler had given Balthier nothing but insult. The skypirate had no reason to offer his hand as salvation.

This was a dream.

But the rags stirred at the skypirate's side, and Vossler saw dark skin, a muscular limb. A too-beautiful face framed by a turban of filthy bindings, there to keep the telltale ears and satin hair flat.

Silently, so smoothly that she merged with the rags that blurred Balthier's outline, Fran reached beside her partner. The graceful curve of her fingers turned claws away from her proffered palm. It was a curve peculiar to Fran. In Rabanastre, none of the Viera warriors that Vossler had known kept their claws so luxuriously long.

Fran decided Vossler as to the reality of the situation. He had not known he remembered that mannerism of hers until he saw it.

And this was still a dream, because Balthier had never seduced him to safety like this. Balthier had never given him the choice to reach upwards and take his hand. Balthier had broken in to Nalbina through the corpse-littered corridors and saved him for the gil paid to him, when Vossler wanted to die.

And before he could reach upwards, something grabbed him by the ankle and dragged him back through the dust and the despair. 

Now this dream, Vossler knew better. Someone shouted, 'Fucking black-eyed bastard, take it like you were born for it!' As it had been many times before, the faces were blonde Dalmascans, the beating fuelled by righteousness. Blonde Dalmascans, the rumour told, were of Raithwall's dynast blood: touched by the gods. They had been prolific, so swiftly dominating those dark-haired rightful owners of Dalmasca's sun-hammered lands. The Dynast's righteous blood was a lie. In flickering crystal, Vayne told Vossler everything: Dalmasca's royal line had been a bloody centuries-long _joke_ , staged by the Occurians, for the Occurians, who laughed loudest and last. Not even won by right of conquest, Dalmasca had been given to a conquering stranger by a stranger being yet, in exchange for the promise of stasis. 

Vossler stayed impassive during these discussions with the Consul, the future Archadian Emperor, giving him nothing, venting his rage and confusion only when alone. After, he cooled his knuckles in a bowl of ice and potion, squatting in Old Dalan's scavenged sanctuary. He said nothing to the wily old Knight. How could he? How many generations had spilled their own blood to protect the rule of these so called divinely sanctioned royals? Ashelia had to go.

Every time after that Ashelia spoke of vengeance, of reclamation, Vossler looked at her and hated. He did not know what he hated. The lies, perhaps; himself, for being a fool. Ashelia's features detached from her milky skin, she was a pastiche, a collage of appropriate behaviours and perceived rights. She had drafted herself blindly, having once seen a king without knowing what construction went beneath the crown. What gave her the right to decide on death for them all?

 _She had no right_ , a treacherous whisper answered.

 _Surely she had earned it now, by destroying the Occuria’s hold,_ said another whisper, too much like Basch.

 _Question your faith_ , Vayne had asked Vossler, with his serpentish tongue. 

That was all Vayne had ever asked of him. To question.

The lick of doubt had been sufficient poison. 

Every decision since then had been Vossler's, made alone. He could never have trusted the Rebellion, half of them royalists desperate for a figurehead, the other half muttering that Raminas had been the one to bring them all to ruin. And because he had never trusted, nor been trusted, Vossler had not fought for their lives. He surrendered their names with the ease of a numbed conscience, in his early days of disgrace, after the Archadians collared him in Shiva's collapsing shell. The insurgents that he named were imprisoned in Nalbina, a newly political prison. The royalists wanted to kill Vossler for betraying Ashelia. The anti-royalists wanted to kill him for keeping Ashelia protected for so very long. The Archadians promised to keep him out of Nalbina Prison: so they traded him to Rozzaria instead. They must have.

How had he returned to treacherous, deadly Nalbina, then? The Rozzarians had wrung him dry of his intelligence, then cast him aside with the other shrivelled husks, a twice-betrayer not even worth the courtesy of an honourable execution.

The beating, when it came, was anonymous, but it came from Dalmascans.

The blows forced wetness out of Vossler when he had thought himself dry. Sweat, bile, the whiplash of blood. After, he lay in a pool of his own wet, kidneys itching, and wished he could drink.

This wasn't right, Vossler thought. He couldn't be dying. 

Last night, he had gone to sleep knowing his reality. A wooden ceiling, a narrow bed, a foggy, salty mist. Balthier and Fran had hauled him out of Nalbina years ago. Fran took Vossler by the hand, strong and calloused. Balthier took him by the wrist. Vossler remembered their combined grasp, if not the nightmarish escape through the caverns beyond, a pathway they had been with Basch once before. Balthier chivvied him every time he fell, cursing and coaxing. Vossler ignored him, eyes on Fran's straight, proud spine as she led the way, the viera crackling with power. He could follow a competence like hers, feel shamed for his falls, try to stop them to spare her the shame of his presence. Apart from the first rough handling, she had never once blessed him with her cool touch, for all that Balthier's hands had been on him and over him, dragging him back to his feet when Vossler's pride would have kept him floored.

He had escaped. He had never received this final beating, which, by the current lack of sensation, would have killed him.

Therefore, this was a dream.


	3. Chapter 3

Abruptly, Vossler woke up. He lunged for the water he had learned to keep near. 

After drowning the impossible thirst, he lowered the flask and found Balthier standing over his deckchair, curiosity evident.

'Back in the land of the living?'

Vossler grunted.

This was the second time today they had shared a morning greeting. Surprisingly enough, the skypirate had been awake early. A ship came in to dock just before dawn, the noise of the celebratory arrivals pulling him from his bed. Pale and unhappy in the crowded eating hall, Balthier drank a disgraceful attempt at a coffee, wincing every time he was jostled, ate nothing, and waved silent Vossler's conversational gambits. Ten minutes Vossler gave him, and kept a methodical count by making each grind of his jaw last a second. Seven minutes after coffee hit that abused stomach, Balthier went green and ran for the stairs. A quick question to the innkeeper got Balthier's room number, which did, fortuitously, have private ablutions attached. Vossler knocked on the door, agreed to delay his grand entrance, and told Balthier to find him on the beach to the inn's rear.

The sun was up by eight, wan warmth on black pebbled sand inducing misplaced homesickness. The horizon would stay fog-veiled for another hour yet, air wet enough to drink. It being summer, there were a few other beach-goers out, togged knee to neck in swimming suits, knitted wool for the cheap and manufacted polymer for the richer, paddling in water that looked like grey ink. 

Clever, Vossler had thought. They were probably drier in the waves than wading through the fog. 

He took a deckchair, which proved him right with its dampness, set his scabbarded sword across his knees, wrapped the baldric around his wrist, and intended to closely watch the lone fisherman's luck. There were two proud hauls of seaweed before sleep snuck up, and Vossler started dreaming.

'Do you remember when you broke me out of Nalbina?'

Curiosity still apparent, Balthier lowered himself to the neighbouring deckchair. He made a face at the wetness and, stiff-shouldered, eased himself into acceptance. 'Not sure. So many vagrant knights rescued out of that hole, they all tend to blur into one after a while. Remind me?'

'Old Dalan paid for my deliverance, you mentioned after.' An inclination of the skypirate's crown, and Vossler continued, 'Why? No, I know why—‘

‘Bonds of brotherhood, and all that?’

And what a bondage it had been, knowing Dalan, knowing he expected more of Vossler even now. Dalan had been the best of them, an instructor to Basch when Vossler had squired to Dalan’s own once-master. Injuries unhealing led the old man off even the training field. Years of his life lived motionless in compensation for scars carried, manufacting a labyrinth of smoke for the pain to wend before it could debilitate his mind. But Dalan had fought for Dalmasca, better, brighter, braver than Vossler had. Pure in the sacrifice of his competence.

A pang. They were all cursed, the once-Knights, for failing their king, for failing the shadowed fiend haunting the royal bloodline. So it seemed. For all that Vossler no longer believed in gods or their curses.

What I want to know, why then? Was it really as urgent as you made it seem?'

Balthier shrugged. 'Nalbina Prison makes my skin crawl. After breaking into it, the quicker out of there, the better. So I thought. And it wasn’t as though the food was much of a draw.’

Had Balthier and Fran come from him a day later, Vossler felt he would have died.

'I dreamed it – then. Right then. That you failed, and I was beaten to death by Dalmascans.'

‘It's the first time you've seen me since we dropped you at Phon, and I'm not exactly oozing success and confidence, am I? Two years out and I’m surprised you’re not dreaming nightly.'

Vossler chafed warmth through his cottons. He inadvertently discovered his elbow had worn through when his little finger caught in the hole and widened it. ‘Shit.’

In compensation, Balthier tugged a compressed packet of whitebait from an upper pocket and proffered it. The battered fish were warm from the fryer.

They ate in silence. Vossler left the heads. Balthier left the tails. 

Shortly, they had company, squalling over the remainder.

'Fran doesn't like fish either?'

'No coastline in Golmore.'

'I assume she likes you thin, is that the point of this decadence?'

Balthier glanced at his untucked shirt. 'Before I met her, you know I used to box heavyweight?'

Vossler feigned choking so well he almost achieved success.

'Honest.'

'I've had the span of your hip. You would have been lucky to make middle.'

Unsought, Vossler's memory presented him with a sharp and uncorrupted image of his hands on Balthier's hips. Those hazy, disassociated days immediately post freedom, when nothing was real and everything could be dared. Balthier faced him, pushed him back in the well-sprung pilot's chair that swung deep and flat but never suggested failure, to straddle him, and Vossler could not move. He had forgotten more about touch than he had ever known.

The conversation moved on in his absence.

'Uh…Did you say cheese?'

'Cheese,' Balthier affirmed. 'Particularly veined. Hates it. Rotten food, she says. "Can't you smell it, the imperfect mortality. A Hume manner, this: to consume with pleasure the decayed."'

Balthier had Fran's cadence exactly.

'And did you consume?'

'With great pleasure. And also wine. Which, I might note, is also fermented, being another term for decay, but Fran's quite good at selectively overlooking which forms of decay to partake, and which she will reject.'

For no particular reason, Vossler noted that, despite things, Balthier talked of his partner in the present tense. He shivered again, this cursed, history-haunted fog. In chafing his gooseflesh, Vossler succeeded in making the hole over his elbow larger.

With casual physical ownership, Balthier hooked a finger through the tear. 'Low on funds?'

His tentative good mood disintegrated. 'Permanently.’

Yet Balthier seemed inclined for company, and descended into mirrored sullenness also. 'I'd lend you one of mine, but they're all on the bloody Strahl.' 

Vossler looked at Balthier as if a stranger, and noticed he wore last night's get-up, degustation stains dry but present. The shadow at his jaw had thickened almost to beard status, even his hair shaggy, curling untidily at his collar and across the brow.

'Skint,' said the skypirate. 'Skint as a slaven.'

'Slaven collect gil. More than one occasion I've found fifty or so on a corpse.'

Balthier gave a slantwards glance, a heavy sigh, and ignored the correction. 'I pity the pickpocket who tries me on, they'll come away the worse for it.'

'How did you manage to pay for a bed? And...the fish.'

'Put it on your tab. Anyway, you owe me. If not for my exquisite sense of timing, our Emperor Larsa Solidor's little serpent plants in Nalbina would've incited the Dalmascan royalists to knock you off.'

Speechless, Vossler watched the last of the fog burn off, pale and sundered above the grey water, the black beach. 

Balthier balled the empty wrapper and tossed it to the waiting birds. Whitebait remnants consumed, their feathered friends departed unanimously, shrieking consensus momentarily preventing speech.

'You knew where to find me all along – you knew I was _here_ —'

'Oh, come on,' Balthier said, angrily, 'if there's one thing all our auspicious adventuring taught me, it's that coincidence really does strike the same place twice. We can beg all we want, old man, but the gods have such fun with the plots of those like you and I.'

 _There are no gods_. 'You honestly didn't come here on purpose?'

'On purpose, yes, but certainly not for _you_. How many times do you have to hear something before it's true?'

They had called Basch a betrayer for two years. Vossler couldn't remember when he started to believe. Not long after. Cemented on meeting him, stories of twins aside. Basch had not raised a word against Ashelia’s path, but watched, weighting her decisions with his judgment so opaque. A Judge Magister well before being knighted as one. 

Years before Vayne, Basch had been the one who questioned Raminas on the righteousness of divine right to rule, on class and commonality, on the definition of _dynast_ and _despot_. His questions had matched Vayne’s, decades later. Basch had always been Basch: the only real betrayal had been Vossler.

‘Albeit,’ Balthier was continuing, ‘a most convenient and more elegant alternative to lean on your providence rather than running again. I am not dismayed to have found you.’

'I wish you asked first. I haven't funds to cover you. And I like it here, I don't want to—shortchange anyone.' 

Balthier shrugged. 'Say I lied. Leave my reputation in ruins.'

'Well, you're in Archadia's borders, at least. You could invoke Gabranth’s name.'

The fluid snarl suited Balthier more than he would ever admit. Vossler startled. This, older and solid, curling hair, the sneer, was the Magisterial warlord Vayne would have made Ffamran become. He was surrounded by Magisters: old memories and future shadows.

It was too much. Vossler grabbed the first thought that suggested salvation. 'Where did Fran leave you?'

'Up the proverbial.' The hand withdrawn, it waved vaguely south. 'Smuggler's 'drome.'

The ex-cartographer in Vossler paired the vague description to location. 'That's not even in Archadia's borders. How did you get across the continent without a gil to your name?'

'Walked.'

'You? Walked?' 

From somewhere beneath his loosened shirt, Balthier withdrew a small mesh bag of walnuts. He cracked one left-handed and extracted the meat. 

As a delaying tactic, it was superlative.

'I am capable of it, you know.'

Perhaps it was the plaintive undertone moving him. ‘If you are so in need, you may join me on my hunt for a share of the spoils.’

‘Oh, may I?’

‘You may.’

‘I suppose you will spot me for my shot and shield?’

‘In advance, and recompense to be drawn from the spoils,’ Vossler said, magnanimous. His pulse caught up with his offer belated, racing clockwise. ‘As a master of the heavyweight division, you should be capable of besting the beasts barehanded.’

‘Ha! I never said I won.’ Lanky legs hooked over the side of the deckchair, one arm across his brow and grinning at the sky, Balthier appeared transported. 

For a moment, Vossler imagined himself caught between that upturned face and the sun that warmed it, the intended recipient of Balthier's humour. But however much he missed someone who knew him, who did not look at him with the eyes of a Magister’s, in Fran's absence, he knew himself a substitute.


End file.
